Geisinger Develops EHR-Neutral Interop Technology

Geisinger Health System in Danville, Penn. and xG Health Solutions, a Geisinger spinoff that opened in 2013, say they have exchanged clinical data in real-time within the Cerner Corporation EHR framework for an in-house app originally developed for the Epic EHR.


Geisinger Health System in Danville, Penn. and xG Health Solutions, a Geisinger spinoff that opened in 2013, say they have exchanged clinical data in real-time within the Cerner Corporation EHR framework for an in-house app originally developed for the Epic EHR.

The partners used an approach developed with support from an ONC Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects grant, specifically the open-source Substitutable Medical Apps, Reusable Technologies (SMArt) Platform.

"This web-based interoperable container and the corresponding HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) interface can exchange information in real-time with any SMArt-on-FHIR-enabled EHR," Geisinger executives said.

They also said the app-based approach extracts data from an EHR and presents information in user-friendly views to clinicians together with clinical decision support.

"This method will enable innovative types of work flow facilitation and clinical decision support to operate on top of any SMArt-on-FHIR-enabled EHR to improve the quality, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of healthcare," they said. "Other approaches for accomplishing the same objective may be developed in the future."

FHIR has been gaining momentum as an open healthcare data standard. According to recommendations made last month by a task force of Health IT Policy and Standards Committee members, FHIR is “currently the best candidate API approach to data-level and document-level access to healthcare data."

More for you

Loading data for hdm_tax_topic #better-outcomes...